A Russian Old Believer village fights to keep its school

The fate of a schoolhouse in one of Alaska's most unusual communities is back before the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly next week — and it's really a question about whether a shrinking Russian Old Believer village can hold onto an institution at its center.

Nikolaevsk was founded in 1968 by five families of Russian Old Believers, members of a faith that split from the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1600s and spent centuries fleeing persecution — through Siberia, China, Brazil, and Oregon — before settling on the Kenai specifically to live apart and preserve their traditions. For decades the Nikolaevsk School was a community anchor, once serving well over a hundred students, teaching Russian, and building the Orthodox Holy Days into its calendar.

That's the backdrop for a proposal that would otherwise read as routine. The borough is weighing whether to hand the school building over to a nonprofit, Alaskan Homestead Education, to keep K-12 education going in Nikolaevsk. The group was described as the only interested party — a telling detail, given the building's remoteness, its deferred maintenance, and carrying costs of roughly $200,000 a year the borough would otherwise keep absorbing. Assembly member Willy Dunne filed to reconsider the transfer, bringing it back to the full body July 7.

The stakes are bigger than one building. Enrollment at Nikolaevsk has fluctuated and thinned as jobs pull Old Believer families toward other communities, and residents have spent years frustrated with how the district runs the school — some pushing to convert it to a charter, others simply watching neighbors leave. A conveyance to a local nonprofit is, in effect, the village trying to keep education in its own hands rather than lose the school entirely. The same night the Assembly takes up the transfer, it will also introduce a measure to keep paying the utilities, maintenance, and insurance on the building — and on other shuttered schools around the borough — a reminder of what it costs to keep an empty or fading school standing while its future gets decided.